Dealing Housewives

Potheads in paradise.

“Weeds,” a new Showtime comedy series in which a suburban widow takes up the not very noble profession of pot-dealing after her husband drops dead, can’t be called courageous, since the premium-cable networks have little to lose when they venture into controversial territory, but it is nonetheless daring. “Weeds” actually meets the rarely fulfilled promise of Showtime’s former slogan: “No Limits.” Showtime suffers from reflexive, and mostly substantive, comparisons with HBO, but “Weeds” puts it a little closer to HBO in its asymptotic relationship with the Tiffany network of the premium-cable universe. (If, that is, such an old-school title can be applied to a channel that, in addition to “The Sopranos” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” offers the uncultured pearls “Cathouse” and “Real Sex.” Of course, the Tiffany network itself, CBS, was the one that sold us such gems as “The Beverly Hillbillies” and “Green Acres.” So enough of that.) “Weeds” brings to mind a number of TV shows—“Desperate Housewives” among them—as well as the movie “E.T.” Like that movie, “Weeds” is set in a soulless development that has been thrown up amid the beautiful and still stubbornly wild California hills (you can encroach on the hills, but they—their coyotes, snakes, and mountain lions—will encroach right back), and the family it revolves around consists of a single mother with children of tender years.

Until the death of her husband, Judah, who had a heart attack while he was out jogging, Nancy Botwin (Mary-Louise Parker) led a regular upper-middle-class life in a community called Agrestic, an unpretty, and misleading, word that means “rural.” (The name is a cleverly sidelong way for the show to establish its attitude toward the suburbs—the implication being that the number of these drywalled dead zones has now outstripped the supply of nice misnomers for them, such as Sylvan Hills and Sparkling Pond Farms.) In some ways, Nancy still is leading a regular life: in the show’s opening scene, she attends a school meeting and tries to persuade the other mothers there to push for the replacement of soda with bottled water and juice in the school’s vending machines. TV shows almost invariably portray school meetings as a no man’s land, with women whispering gossip to one another or becoming absurdly adamant about a minor matter affecting their own precious child. “Weeds” is no exception; this is how the show tells us both that there are dirty secrets in these California closets and that it has satirical credibility. Like most shows, “Weeds” doesn’t win any points for subtlety in this area, or in some others, including its soundtrack, which underlines every moment with all too obvious knowingness. The show’s theme song is the insufferably smug sixties folk ditty “Little Boxes,” by the protest singer Malvina Reynolds, an indictment of suburban conformity that you need to hear only once in your life, for historical purposes. It doesn’t feel good to be talked down to at the beginning of every episode of a show.

Luckily, “Weeds,” which was created by Jenji Kohan, who also wrote almost half the episodes (her first name sounds almost like a slang term for marijuana), is better than its theme song. And dramatically it does take us into some unexpected places. In that opening scene, Nancy, instead of breaking down upon realizing that she’s the subject of gossip, or cracking under the strain of new widowhood, holds her own against the chattering asses and against Celia (Elizabeth Perkins), another mother who has a strong opinion on the soda question. Nancy does break down toward the end of the first episode, but the timing of the scene is a surprise and the moment is brief. This character is less trembly and vulnerable than the ones Parker often plays, and the change suits her. She isn’t just doing a turn on a stereotype in this role; she’s showing us a real, idiosyncratic person.

Nancy’s coolness extends to lying to her children, fifteen-year-old Silas (Hunter Parrish) and his tween brother, Shane (Alexander Gould). When she is paged at an odd hour and has to leave the house, Shane asks where she’s going, and she says, “It’s a Neighborhood Watch thing.” Waiting for her in her car is Josh (Justin Chatwin), a smart-mouthed teen-age dealer whose inventory was depleted by local moviegoers getting high for the midnight showing of “Winged Migration.” “Shit hasn’t gone this fast since ‘The Passion of the Christ,’ ” he says. Everything that comes out of Josh’s mouth is a sarcastic comment about the hypocrisy of adults generally—especially the ones who use dope—or of Nancy specifically, since she is dealing but, at the same time, ordering him not to sell to kids.

In the first five episodes of “Weeds” (the series, which is ten episodes long, began in early August and continues through mid-October), the show itself doesn’t appear to be taking sides when it comes to the legality and morality of marijuana-dealing or possession or use, and it isn’t, like Josh, preoccupied with hypocrisy, except in a comedic way. Viewers probably can’t help feeling a little unsettled by Nancy’s business, even though her intention is to turn the front she sets up with her accountant, Doug (the hilarious Kevin Nealon), who is also one of her best clients, into a legitimate enterprise. At the same time, it’s funny to see how her entrepreneurial abilities flower under the pressure of competition—it’s a shining example of American capitalism at work. In the third episode, Nancy kicks into a higher gear, and so does the show, when she discovers that there’s a parallel universe of pot distribution out there—the shops that sprang up to dispense medical marijuana after the passage of California’s Proposition 215, in 1996—and that it’s taking customers away from her. When she checks out one of these emporiums, she’s so impressed by the rich array of product that she calls the place “the Whole Foods of pot.” (The different varieties even have cutesy names; the Stephen Hawking, for example, is so strong that it will put you in a wheelchair.) To win back her customers, Nancy starts her own food line: doped-up popcorn balls, corn bread, brownies. It’s a roaring success.

“Weeds” has something of the comic tone of “Arrested Development” when it comes to its attitude toward what makes this country hum (though that show, which is more freewheeling, actually takes a harder line on its subject, presenting the American dream as bankrupt), but it also works as a drama. Silas and Shane have to cope with the death of their father and its side effects—one bratty kid calls Shane “orphan boy,” and money is so tight that the Botwins’ phone gets cut off. Myths about certain aspects of family life are busted, too: Nancy tells Doug that she can’t let her housekeeper go because she’s like family, but the housekeeper doesn’t see it that way—she wants to be paid, and she wants to be paid on time. Celia, who, it turns out, is Nancy’s friend despite her iciness in the show’s first scene, is also going through hard times, some of which are funny and some of which are not. Celia bears an uncanny resemblance to Bree, the controlling perfectionist played by Marcia Cross in “Desperate Housewives.” She calls her chubby daughter Isabel “Isabelly,” and replaces the girl’s secret stash of chocolate with an identical-looking laxative, which leads to a humiliating episode at school for Isabel. Celia’s awful, but drolly so, and she’s not unsympathetic.

It’s really the acting that makes “Weeds,” particularly that of Parker and Perkins. They’re terrific, separately and in their scenes together. They look a lot alike—they could easily play sisters—and the fact that their characters are so different reminds you how often actresses are called upon merely to live up to the stereotype of their looks. There is one shoddy aspect of “Weeds,” however, and that’s the depiction of Nancy’s supplier, Heylia (Tonye Patano), pronounced “Hell yeah”—a monotonously sassy black woman who is meant to be a tongue-in-cheek indictment of the way blacks are represented in pop culture. It makes you question Kohan’s feel for her own material. But, for the most part, the sensibility on display here is an interesting combination of sober and antic. And there’s no way you can dislike a show with a line like this: When Nancy calls Doug an idiot, he replies proudly, “I’m an idiot savant.” ♦

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